Abstract
Neutrinos undergoing stochastic perturbations as they propagate experience decoherence, damping neutrino oscillations over distance. Such perturbations may result from fluctuations in space-time itself if gravity is a quantum force, including interactions between neutrinos and virtual black holes. In this work we model the influence of heuristic neutrino-virtual black hole interaction scenarios on neutrino propagation and evaluate the resulting signals in astrophysical and atmospheric neutrinos. We demonstrate how these effects can be represented in the framework of open quantum systems, allowing experimental constraints on such systems to be connected to quantum gravitational effects. Finally, we consider the energy-dependence of such Planck scale physics at energies observed in current neutrino experiments, and show that sensitivity to Planck scale physics well below the `natural' expectation is achievable in certain scenarios.
Highlights
The mixing between neutrino mass and flavor eigenstates produces the phenomena of neutrino oscillations, where a neutrino produced as one flavor may be detected some time later as another, and is well established experimentally [1,2,3]
We have demonstrated the resulting signal for four ν-virtual black holes (VBH) interaction scenarios by injecting perturbations into a software model of neutrino propagation, we will look to represent this physics in the open quantum system formalism often used to represent neutrino decoherence
To verify the D matrices in Eqs. (11) to (13) and the assertion that Lcoh can be interpreted as the ν-VBH interaction mean free path, in Fig. 4 we show the oscillation probabilities computed using both the open quantum system formalism and by injecting perturbations into our neutrino propagation model
Summary
The mixing between neutrino mass and flavor eigenstates produces the phenomena of neutrino oscillations, where a neutrino produced as one flavor may be detected some time later as another, and is well established experimentally [1,2,3] This is a quantum superposition effect that is maintained over macroscopic distances due to the feeble interactions between neutrinos and matter, allowing the neutrino to propagate largely in isolation from its environment. We demonstrate how the derived phenomena can be represented in the framework of open quantum systems, which is commonly employed in neutrino decoherence phenomenology and experimental searches [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29] This framework is very general, making constraints on the parameters of the open quantum system difficult to physically interpret. Well below the natural expectation in some scenarios, and compute the expected signal resulting from these effects in both astrophysical and atmospheric neutrinos
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